April 30, 2013

Last night was warm, and we slept with the bedroom windows slightly open. So M., light sleeper that she is, hears the emergency siren wailing down the valley and shakes me awake at 2:22 a.m.

Outside on the porch, I can hear it too. There is no glow in the sky. What is happening?

I call the sheriff's dispatcher — "Vehicle fire. Mile marker 26." I pull on some pants and long-sleeved shirt, stumble down to the garage, don my turnout gear (kept here rather than at the fire house), fumble the magnetic red light crookedly onto the Jeep roof, and drive way.

Reaching the state highway, I can see down toward MM 26, and there is nothing but blackness. A set of flashing lights is coming toward me though — a state trooper, who says the wreck is up the other way. More lights behind me — our engine.

Over a rise, and there is the scene — a sheriff's deputy, an ambulance, Nearby Town's engine, and — crunched against a ponderosa pine tree — a once-lovely vintage Jaguar Mark 2 saloon car, as the Brits would call it, still smoking from the engine compartment. Right-hand drive, even.

RECONSTRUCTION: The driver (not injured) coming down the canyon, had swerved to avoid a deer. Perhaps over-correcting, he went off the road and hit the tree. Thinking he could reverse onto the highway, he re-started the engine, even though he could smell gasoline. Poof!!He could not get a cell phone signal (welcome to the neighborhood), so he started walking down until he could. He was connected to a tower in the next county north, so his 911 call went to their dispatcher, who alerted their nearest fire department. Hence the incorrect location too, I think.Then, after 15 minutes or so, they called our sheriff's dispatcher, who sent a deputy and "toned out" our department.

Nearby Town's engine leaves. We set up traffic control and wait for the wrecker. When the wrecker driver starts to move the car, the battery throws some sparks, so I grab the bolt cutters and cut a cable. (Should have done that earlier — I don't work enough car wrecks).

After the car is moved, we check to be sure that it had not left any smoldering embers in the pine duff underneath. Luckily, it had crashed on the side of the highway burned in the October 23, 2012 fire. Fuel is scarce. But if it had gone off the other side, it would have been surrounded by unburned trees and brush, and I might still be out there.

One of our firefighters has a little home egg business, so since we are all awake, I ask if I could pick up a dozen afterwards. Of course, she says. (Ruth's Egg Barn: Open 24 Hours to Serve You.)

At 4:05 a.m., I am climbing our front steps, still in turnout gear, with a carton of eggs. There ought to be funny caption for that picture, but I am too fuzzy to think of one.

April 27, 2013

"I believe this is really going to
revitalize and strengthen farm communities," said [Ryan] Loflin, 40, who grew
up on a farm in Springfield but left after high school for a career in
construction.

Now he returns, leasing 60 acres of his father's
alfalfa farm to plant the crop and install a press to squeeze the oil
from hemp seeds. He'll have a jump on other farmers, with 400 starter
plants already growing at an indoor facility prior to transplanting them
in the field.

M. and I were just discussing planting potatoes during breakfast. Grand Junction is lower and warmer than where we live, so people are already planting there.

In an effort to benefit the Japanese and find nonextractive ways to use
forests, which cover 67 percent of the country’s landmass, the
government has funded about $4 million in forest-bathing research since
2004. It intends to designate a total of 100 Forest Therapy sites within
10 years. Visitors here are routinely hauled off to a cabin where
rangers measure their blood pressure, part of an effort to provide ever
more data to support the project.

But just do it yourself. You don't need to write haiku, unless you want to.

The "nature as a gym" crowd is doing it wrong.

And don’t think you’re off the hook if you exercise outdoors. You are
quite likely still tethered to civilization. Perhaps you’re strapped to a
heart monitor or headset. Admit it: Have you brought your phone? Are
you clocking wind sprints? Sure, you are deriving some mental and
physical benefits, but evidence is mounting that to get the most out of
nature, you really need to be present in it, not distracted by your own
great story of self.

April 23, 2013

Recent debates over gun-ownership have seen the pro-gun rights side reacting to calls for restriction with the counter-argument that what we really need is more attention paid to the mentally ill.

On its website, the National Rifle Association states, "The NRA has supported legislation to ensure that appropriate records of
those who have been judged mentally incompetent or involuntarily
committed to mental institutions be made available for use in firearms
transfer background checks."

This seems like a good response to those politicians who want to turn law-abiding citizens into criminals with the stroke of a pen. We all agree that "crazy people shouldn't have guns."

But is there a hidden danger here? Who defines "mental illness"? The mental-health industry (drug makers, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other therapists) keeps enlarging the definition.

The new fifth edition of the DIagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will have even more categories than the fourth edition had. And the DSM-4 already offered catch-all categories such as "adjustment disorder," which let a therapist medicalize any mild depression, etc., assign it a code number, and let patients submit claims to their insurance carries.

If we think of having a diagnosable mental illness as being under a
tent, the tent seems pretty big. Huge, in fact. How did it happen that
half of us will develop a mental illness? Has this always been true and
we just didn’t realize how sick we were—we didn’t realize we were under
the tent? Or are we mentally less healthy than we were a generation ago?
What about a third explanation—that we are labeling as mental illness
psychological states that were previously considered normal, albeit
unusual, making the tent bigger. The answer appears to be all three.

Where [psychiatrist Jeffrey[ Kahn's book is a genial guide to American angst, [Edward] Shorter's How Everyone Became Depressed is a polemical, alarmist complaint about the psychiatric profession,
the big pharmaceutical companies, and the changes within medicine about
diagnosis and terminology. Shorter, a professor of history at the
University of Toronto, who went down this road in Before Prozac (Oxford, 2008), argues that the overelaboration of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),
the updated fifth edition of which will appear in May, has led to the
multiplication of nervous syndromes. "Most clinicians, in their heart of
hearts, thought anxiety and depression were really the same illness: It
was only the DSM drafters who wanted to keep them apart," he says.

If you are not taking psychotropic medication yourself, you know people who are. And since not everyone metabolizes these medications the same way, perhaps you have heard stories of how a switch in medication caused the patient to become crazier, until they begged their psychiatrist to prescribe something else.

Furthermore, boys more than girls tend to receive psychoactive drugs. Making the connection, one writer notes, "It is simply indisputable that most perpetrators of school shootings and
similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just
recently coming off of – psychiatric medications."*

This is one aspect of school shootings that has not been examined enough. Could "Why did they do it?" have some connection with psychotropic medication?

So, gun owners, think about these questions:

• if you like the NRA's language about "involuntarily committed," do you think that if someone is placed on a 72-hour hold, the SWAT team should kick down the door and seize all firearms in the household? Even if that person is released subsequently with a pat on the hand?

• Do you think that a therapist who thinks guns are icky might get a patient to admit to owning one and then report that patient as a danger to society?

• Do you think that the gun-banners might seek to leverage the DSM-5 to make gun ownership more difficult in the name of protecting society from the "mentally ill"?

One way to illuminate these changes is by comparing the original BSA handbook, published in 1911, with the modern version – the 12th edition was introduced in 2009. In an incisive book review for the Claremont Institute,
Kathleen Arnn conducts this type of side-by-side analysis. She points
out that while the modern version contains many of the same skills as
the original, “its discussions of these things have been pared down and
lack the verve, punch, and adventurous spirit—the manliness—of the
original handbook.”

• • •

Modern badge requirements also diverge from the old in their more
abstract, mental nature. While the 1911 badge requirements are all
direct actions, often of the physical, hands-on variety, the modern
badge requirements emphasize more thinking than doing. The hands-on
tasks are now tucked into long lists of requirements that ask the scout
to thoroughly Review/Describe/Explain/Illustrate/Demonstrate the
underlying principles and context of the badge’s subject matter before
trying their hand at it.

April 20, 2013

While I was away in South Carolina, M. reported that she came outside on the 13th to find a bird-feeder opened up and licked clean of sunflower seeds. So the bears are out.

Then yesterday, as we stood in the mud discussing something about the garden water system, there was a buzzing around our heads. Chico* the broad-tailed hummingbird had arrived and was circling the area where the sugar-water feeder should be. Very soon, it was.

Something about the arrival of the hummingbirds always clutches me. It may well snow again, but when they are here, it is the summer half of the year. And in September, even though the weather may be hot, the day comes when the last one (always a female) shutters and locks the summer house, takes her tote bag full of paperback novels, and goes away, and then it isn't summer anymore.

*All male broad-tails are named Chico, just as all scrub jays are named Timmy. Why Chico? Perhaps because he seems to have come home from the wars.

Every Colorado town that wants to bring in tourists has a festival. Some have many — I do believer that Salida, for example, has a different festival every two weeks. There are Pioneer Days and sporting events, antique-car shows and massed plein air paint-ins, music festivals and fishing tournaments.

Then there is Karval, in Lincoln County on the High Plains, linking its image to the mountain plover. Most Coloradans could not find Karval on the map, and most could not recognize a mountain plover, I am sure.

But they are trying. Here is Colorado Parks & WIldlife's news release:

Despite their name, mountain plovers do not breed in the mountains, instead, they prefer shortgrass prairies. The eastern plains of Colorado are the primary breeding grounds for the mountain plover and more than half of the world's population nests in the state. Mountain plovers, are a considered a species of "special concern" in Colorado because of declining numbers.

"The Mountain Plover Festival is a great way for people to experience the authentic small town atmosphere of a rural community while watching birds and learning about the culture and history of Colorado's eastern plains," said John Koshak, a watchable wildlife coordinator with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

"Guided tours provide an opportunity to observe plover nesting behavior and Karval residents pour on a big helping of hospitality to make certain the bird-watchers enjoy themselves," he said.

Plovers are commonly thought of as shorebirds, but the mountain plover is unique. The mountain plover breeds in the shortgrass prairies along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies from Montana to the Texas Panhandle. They winter from central California and southern Arizona southward into Mexico. Some of their more abundant nesting grounds lie in bare patches on the short grass prairie and farm fields surrounding Karval.

Mountain plovers are about 8 - 9 inches in height, have long legs, and are sandy-brown in coloration. Breeding adults have black forecrowns, white foreheads, and a thin, black eye line. In winter, adults and young birds appear with a plain face, making their dark eyes stand out. Mountain plovers have a white wing stripe and wing linings, and a black band near the tail tip.

A bus takes participants to sites on the prairie to points near the plovers' nesting sites where people are likely to see songbirds, burrowing owls, pronghorn, deer, eagles and other raptors.

Saturday and Sunday morning tours begin at 6 a.m. with breakfast served at 5:30 a.m., so birders can get out to the prairie just when the mountain plovers are becoming active.

Koshak said the birds make their nests in bare patches on the prairie, but they also like to nest around prairie dog towns, windmills, water tanks, and spots where ranchers feed their cattle on the range. The reason is simple: Those are the spots where they can find bugs to eat.

Mother Nature has endowed the birds with very protective instincts, though, so they will dance and squirt away from their nests trying to draw anything that comes near away from their eggs or hatchlings. Bird experts from the Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, all of which help to sponsor the festival, will be on hand to explain the more scientific details about the birds, Koshak said.

The area around Karval is a haven for bird watchers with several sites included on the Colorado Birding Trail. In addition to seeing mountain plovers, bird watchers could see many other species, including burrowing owls, golden eagles, Wilson's snipe, lark buntings and bluebirds.

At the same time, the birders will gain more understanding of how landowners and biologists work together to study and preserve the nesting grounds for the elusive birds. Some of the ranchers they will meet are third-generation residents of Karval, the sons and daughters of homesteaders who are excellent stewards of Colorado's high plains grasslands.

April 16, 2013

One type re-evaluated is Triceratops, early specimens of which were found in Frémont County, Colorado.

Some journalists came to the mistaken conclusion that paleontologists were about to eliminate Triceratops,
one of the most beloved dinosaurs of all time! Dinosaur fans were
outraged at the news, voicing their discontent in Internet comment
threads and on Facebook. (My favorite protest was a mock-up of a T-shirt
featuring three Triceratops howling at Pluto, the recently demoted dwarf planet.) Eventually, word went out that Triceratops was safe, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the public reaction as I searched fruitlessly for more dinosaurs in Wyoming. The Triceratops
debacle perfectly highlighted the tension between the pop culture
dinosaurs we love and the science that is spurring the evolution of
dinosaurian visions.

April 10, 2013

I don't like my hometown. But I do love it, because it - in its own
infuriating way - taught me the most important lesson in life: you
haven't grown up until you care about someone else more than yourself.

April 07, 2013

I spent parts of the last two afternoons on the computer, taking an online version of S-190, one of the basic wildland firefighting courses that qualifies you for your federal "red card." (Which stopped being red in 2010, I think.)

This is like being sent back to middle school, but what happened when I and others from my department took these courses in Nearby Town several years ago was that the former (note qualifier) assistant chief never turned in the paperwork to the feds.

We passed our physical tests, went back each year for refreshers, etc., but apparently we had fallen through the cracks. So now we are starting all over again. Bother.

But now you can do the courses and multiple-choice tests online, although a qualified instructor still has to come in at the end. It's a hoot. Every so often there is a review quiz, and if you get 100 percent right, you get a cheery congratulatory message on the screen.

And there is evidence that insects and plants "hear" each other's
sounds. Bees buzz at just the right frequency to release pollen from
tomatoes and other flowering plants. And bark beetles may pick up the
air bubble pops inside a plant, a hint that trees are experiencing
drought stress.

Implications for drought:

In the arid Southwest, [Duke University botantist Dan] Johnson was surprised to find that the plants
considered the most drought-tolerant, such as junipers, did worst at
repairing embolisms. Broad-leaf plants, including rhododendrons and
beaked hazels, were better at fixing the damage caused by dry pipes.

I know that I did not fit the "snaggle-toothed" profile. For a period of years I was a Volkswagen-camper driving university professor, with a bulging Lands' End briefcase full of textbooks and student papers. I sent money to my local NPR radio station.

As a registered Democrat, I was an Obama delegate in 2008 to the county Democratic assembly. Granted, that was more because I did not want to see a Clinton dynasty (or any other dynasty) than out of deep support for BHO.

On the other hand, I grew up in a hunting family, owned firearms, and joined the National Rifle Association in my mid-twenties. Even in my anarcho-hippie days, I reasoned that if widespread ownership of firearms by citizens made the politicians nervous, then that was a good enough reason right there to own them. Politicians should be nervous, or they become complacent and corrupt.

The "wish to ban" is an odd psychological phenomenon. Some people do think that if we removed a certain class of inanimate objects from the world, all would be fine, the lion would lie down with the lamb, and no one would hurt each other. (See also Prohibition, War on [Some] Drugs.)

Evidently, Gov. Hickenlooper is one of those banners-of-things, given his vague and weaselly language at the bill-signing. He is happy to turn law-abiding people into criminals with poorly written laws, and he is apparently happy to hand his 2014 electoral opponent a campaign message such as "Hickenlooper's Colorado: Hundreds of Jobs Destroyed."

I can only assume, therefore, that he did it for the culture war. He did it to show people like me (who voted for him, I admit) that we are ignorant, violent enemies of civilization, or some such thing. The job losses are just collateral damage, for the culture war must be won. Citizens must be defenseless and passive, waiting for the people-who-know-better to take care of them.